house hunter’s fallacy

HGTV’s “House Hunters” shows a perfectly packaged trio of homes for a potential buyer to purchase. The home buyer and their agent tour the properties and complain about wallpaper or the price or the location but generally speaking all homes shown are plausible future addresses for the buyer. When it came out this show is mostly staged I sort of shrugged my shoulders and moved on, but now that I’m living the life of an actual “House Hunter” I am enraged that this show was ever seen as anything but fiction.

We’ve seen about twenty homes in person. Put one offer on a house that I loved, really loved from the moment we walked in, only to see a cash buyer come in at the last possible hour before the contract was agreed upon by the lawyers. And now we are dealing with an FSBO who presented himself as a gregarious friendly guy, but now is just playing games with us.

The most disheartening part of this home search is how little I like most of the homes. You can scan on Zillow for hours and think you have a good idea of a home’s feel, look, location; nothing beats being there in person. At all. I’m going to get permanent scowl lines from wrinkling my nose up so much during our house hunting.

Moving out of state is hard, but the hardest part is driving to the location just to look. What was last month a fun road trip adventure, is now just an arduous traffic jammed torture reminding me of how much time we are wasting.

I think my heart isn’t over losing my dream home. I don’t think I can fully invest in a property until we are at the altar of contract signing. There’s a real chance we will end up in an extended-stay hotel this summer while we compromise and negotiate our way into a new home. And I’m already tired of it all.

Forgive me for this maudlin post. I’m sure next week I’ll have great news and within a few months I’ll be typing into the blog in a shiny new-to-us home, looking out my window into a big green lush backyard where our new neighbors and best friends are BBQing with us – but right now I’m just discouraged. I want a perfect real estate agent to sweep me into the perfect home like now, okay? Thanks…